Over my decade working in web marketing, I've spent a ton of time at various marketing conferences, and I've read countless books and blogs about new media. I've noticed a disturbing trend over the past few years in the social media end of the communications world. Much of the advice and strategy I hear boils down to little more than "unicorns and rainbows" superstitions like "engage in the conversation" and "be awesome." Not only has much of the industry ignored hard metrics and dollars-and-cents ROI math; there has actually been a vocal opposition to measurement and accountability.

Effective marketers expect to see clear cut, positive ROI for every other channel of online marketing including email, search, and display advertising. But for some reason, many seem to forget about return when it comes to channels like Facebook and Twitter.

At HubSpot, the inbound marketing software company where I work, we're obsessed with hard data and metrics for every inch of our business. So it seemed like a no-brainer to me that we should understand exactly what the value of each social networking connection is to our bottom line. It was out of that love of numbers that I began work on the value of a like (VOAL) formula.

Wall Street JournalThe Science Behind GiftingWall Street Journal"Everyone has been a giver and receiver often in the past," says Francis Flynn, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, who has...

Seventy-three percent of CEOs think marketers lack business credibility and 77 percent believe marketers don't talk about what really matters—sales. If this sounds like your business or company, it's clearly time to find a way to measure the return on investment of all those hours dedicated to social media.

This infographic has some tips and examples that can help and explains how to use statistics and analytics to determine and identify conversions, sales leads and potential leads...

Check out the graphic for more tips, as well as advice on how to grow your Facebook and Twitter fan base...

Robin Good: PlagSpotter is a free web service which allows you to rapidly identify which specific sentences of your articles have been duplicated elsewhere on the web and at which specific URLs they have been republished.

After analyzing a specific URL, PlagSpotter presents you with a report, that includes a copy of the text published at the URL you have specified, in which the sentences that have been duplicated elsewhere, havebeen highlighted.

By clicking on any of the highlighted sentences you can get a list of the URLs where that specific content has been duplicated.

From the official site: "PlagSpotter is an online duplicate content checker that allows users to put their webpage URLs in to start an Internet duplicate content scanning and detection process.

The user can get a list of sites that duplicate the original source by displaying excerpts of the plagiarized text in a sentence by sentence format."

It's pretty clear that RedBull knows what they're doing when it comes to content marketing. The Space Jump took place almost a month ago, and people are still talking about how genius it was for the company's marketing and PR.

The metrics in this post are proof that, if you find the right event and create the right content on the right channels, you can completely explode.

The team at Awareness surveyed 469 marketers from wide varieties of industries, company sizes and levels of social marketing expertise. Respondents came from a cross-section of executives, managers and those who support the social marketing functions within their organizations.

This Infographic summarizes the key findings from The State Of Social Marketing Report: 7 Major Findings & In-Depth Analysis

7 items with important business value:

Misalignment Between Business Objectives, Measurement Methodologies and Social Marketing Investment Tighter Integration between Social and Rest of Marketing and Business Overall Social Marketers Are Starting to Measure What Matters Marketers Are Yet to Tap into the True Potential of Social Social Marketing Budgets and Resources Insufficient to Drive Value Top Social Platforms: The Big 3: Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn Still Dominate Limited Outsourcing

"The Google quality score is an estimation of how relevant your landing page, keywords, and ads are to the keyword you’re targeting as well as the people viewing your content, where your ad will be located on the page, and how much Google is going to charge you for your ad location."

Here, Digital Net Agency, takes a close look at Quality Scores and discuss how to improve yours.

We've started adjusting the ranking of videos in YouTube search to reward engaging videos that keep viewers watching. This is a continuation of ongoing efforts to focus our video discovery features on watch time, and follows changes we made to Suggested Videos in March, and recent improvements to YouTube Analytics.

Google has rolled out a new homepage design for mobile devices. The fresh version of the search engine’s on-the-go layout includes a large menu of various Google services.

As the folks at The Android Soul noted, “[the t]op bar on Google’s mobile homepage is now pretty similar to desktop’s.” Indeed. What brought this harmonization isn’t too hard to guess: the old mobile Google was a touch hard to navigate with normal-sized fingers. In one move, Google has homogenized its user interfaces, and made its chief product easier to use in a mobile environment.

OpenSlate released findings about the top 1000 YouTube Channels; measuring top channels metrics around Engagement, Consistency and Influence and ranks who the top are by category.

The findings show that in 30 days the top 1000 channels produce 30,000 videos - totaling 173 days of viewing time- that generate roughly 11.3 billion views.

The study also looked at the Top 1000's social engagement, and found that the average Top 1000 channel generates 44,000 social interactions on Facebook each week.

As the Infographic illustrates, music and gaming dominate the ranks of popular channels on YouTube, accounting collectively for 45% of the 1,000 most-viewed. Comedy (14%), entertainment (13%), and How-to & Style (7%) round out the top five categories.

The top 1,000 channels generate an average of $23,000 each month from YouTube ads alone. That’s not including the many sponsorships and product endorsements channel managers sign themselves.

Google’s Matt Cutts used Twitter this afternoon to announce that Google is launching the latest “data refresh” of its Penguin spam-fighting algorithm today and that it will affect searches across multiple languages.

If you have been following the KISSmetrics blog for a while, you know there is plenty of valuable information you can discover about your online marketing campaign from both KISSmetrics and Google Analytics by using conversion funnels and various other features. But what about your offline marketing campaign?

If you place ads in print magazines or newspapers, have a commercial on TV, pass out brochures or pamphlets, exhibit at conferences, have a billboard on the side of the road, or utilize vehicle wraps, then you may already be struggling with measuring your offline marketing results. In today’s post, we’re going to look at a few easy ways to track your offline promotions online through Google Analytics and various other strategies.

Moneycontrol.comGoogle launches an awesome augmented reality game called 'Ingress' [video]The Droid GuyTo kick-start it's Google Goggles Campaign, and to give people the much desired feel of 'augmented reality', Google has launched an awesome...

Educate yourself about the importance of visual information on your website. With infographics, you will gain a lot more traffic for your growing website.

Visual information is processed faster by the brain, with 90% of all the information that we take in is visual. But the thing with visual information is also that unless it’s a really good story or article, people don’t want to read through a whole page of text when he or she could do something else more fun. So, throw in an infographic with visual information, and you’ll have a winner...

Robin Good: eBay has gone the Pinterest way by redesigning its web interface and allowing you to curate your preferred product categories as well as more specific parameters like the price range you are interested in, whether you want new or used items or prefer auctions to "buy-now" offerings.

"Everything now centers on a Pinterest-like feed of featured, personalized, and self-curated products."

WebProNews reports: eBay says that the feed will show users “a collection of items selected for you, based on your shopping history or your own personal interests.” When a logged-in user first accesses the feed, they are given the opportunity to “follow” certain types of product lines as well as connect their feed to their Facebook interests.

eBay officially announced: “Today we begin to introduce a series of significant new features and enhancements for our customers. We’re delivering a cleaner, contemporary look and feel; a more intuitive, convenient way to browse, decide and buy – both globally and locally; and a new personal way to curate your own shopping experience and discover items perfect for you...”

To test the new eBay curated feed, interface redesign and new logo, head to eBay.com (US version) and you will be immediately offered to select five product categories you are interested in.

The new eBay also allows users to integrate their Facebook account as well as their PayPal one to make it easier and faster to sell and buy on the popular online marketplace.

Often B2B organisations are not getting the most from today’s marketing since they don’t have a planned approach based on an integrated inbound marketing plan.

Smart Insights created an Infographic showing the latest research on how companies are using inbound marketing and digital marketing with advice on key issues to think through at each step which are relevant to all involved in inbound and content marketing.

The results across different studies show that while many companies are delivering brilliant results, many could do more.

We have all heard it said many times: "Content is king." In general, this statement is true, but it needs some qualification. This column looks at the role of Query Deserves Diversity and how it impacts your content strategy.

Good article by Eric Enge about the need to differentiate content to stop it from becoming ambiguous in terms of search.

The bottom line is that "Potential linkers, or people on social media sites that share content related to buying homes, aren't going to share your new articles on mortgage tips or home inspections, unless the articles say something very new, different, and compelling."

So we've come full circle. All the SEO activity in the world won't help a site that doesn't have unique, compelling content. Content is King after all.

Facebook Search ranking factors could indeed be much different than traditional SEO factors. And that can have a huge impact on how digital marketers work, especially how it relates to SEO, social media marketing, and paid search.

Until Facebook launches a serious search engine, SEOs will continue executing, analyzing, and refining their efforts based on a number of SEO ranking factors related to websites, webpages, links, on-page optimization, domain authority, etc.

Sure, Google and Bing continually update their algorithms, but we know that on-page optimization is important, building high-quality links is important, pumping out high-quality and unique content is important, etc.

So, what happens if a big player jumps in the game with a completely different set of ranking factors?

What if Facebook launches a killer search engine? What will it look like and how will it work? And more importantly for digital marketers, what will the ranking factors be?

In a new infographic from All Web Design Info, we get to take a look at web design history and how the Internet has evolved since it was first introduced to us.

The World Wide Web got introduced to the general public as late as in the 1990s. It feels like it’s been a lot longer since I started using this highly creative way of sharing, innovating and connecting. However, the Internet’s web design history is really fresh compared to many other things we are still using today.

HTML has become the backbone of the Internet itself, and it is apparently in its fourth generation right now. Many new and more effective languages have been added since HTML became popular, but it still serves as one of the main keys to creating a visually stunning and user friendly website. The second generation of the HTML language was introduced in order to stop confusion about the tags available. People had started to add their own tags, so between 1992 and 1994 the second generation of HTML was put together to unify the language and make it more simple.

Today, HTML 5 is becoming more and more popular, and it looks like many of the features that previously we were only able to include through Java, Javascript and so forth have been injected into the HTML 5 batch enabling more creativity without having to involve other languages. This ultimately makes the work easier for any web developer and designer. Only the collective developers and designers know what web design history will be written in the future since they are the ones who together invent features and approaches that in the future will require simpler implementations.

Sharing your scoops to your social media accounts is a must to distribute your curated content. Not only will it drive traffic and leads through your content, but it will help show your expertise with your followers.

Integrating your curated content to your website or blog will allow you to increase your website visitors’ engagement, boost SEO and acquire new visitors. By redirecting your social media traffic to your website, Scoop.it will also help you generate more qualified traffic and leads from your curation work.

Distributing your curated content through a newsletter is a great way to nurture and engage your email subscribers will developing your traffic and visibility.
Creating engaging newsletters with your curated content is really easy.